Is it possible to experience nostalgia for a home which one has never truly left? The individual who, like the slighted, forlorn older brother of the Prodigal Son parable in Luke's Gospel, chooses to cleave to native soil, refusing the temptations of elsewhere, is frequently denied the chance to speak of home, as if this rejection of mobility is always a signifier of a story-free, constricted life. Twentieth- and twenty-first century literature abounds with tropes of exile and ostracism: Modernist narratives, for example, frequently thrive on rebellious flights from family, political banishment and spiritual homelessness. James Joyce, the exemplary literary émigré, explores self-conscious disaffection with home in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1914). Stephen Dedalus, Joyce's unruly avatar, disavows conventional belonging and chooses instead ‘silence, exile, and cunning’ as artistic ‘defence’. Such self-determined separation is radically different from the experience of forced and economically impelled dislocation that informs a variety of post-colonial and migrant writings. What stories, by contrast, might be told by or about men and women who voluntarily stay close to their birthplace?

Narratives of the (more or less) settled domestic life risk charges of inertia or, worse, of a highly suspect strand of sentimentalism. However, home – a space longed for, resented, at once familiar and strange – might be experienced and spoken of in a myriad of different idioms. Charles Causley (1917–2003) is relatively unusual among twentieth-century English poets for his lifetime rootedness in a single place: Launceston, the Cornish town in which he was born, worked (he was, for close to thirty years, a teacher in the school he attended as a boy) and died at the age of 86. However, Causley was never simply a provincial poet, in spite of a lifetime fascination with the local, particular and domestic; and, instead, his entire career might be regarded as a public wrestling with concepts of home and belonging, departure and return. It has become something of a commonplace to observe that Causley's rare fidelity to the town of his birth was interrupted only by the inconvenience of the Second World War and his six years of service in the Royal Navy.